Why Super Mario Bros. 3 was the last great Mario game.

[liquidninja]

Malstrom has responded to a kotaku article title "Stop Telling Me What To Do" and dicided to add on to it.

http://seanmalstrom.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/stop-telling-me-what-to-do-kotaku/

In short, no tutorials, no collectables and no puzzles. I'd like to add unique levels, items and enemy's to that assessment. He's right as always.

I have received many emails on this Kotaku article.

I was pretty lost on the Japan stuff (then again, many things about Japan confuse me), but many of his complaints have matched mine. I like how he has the balls to criticize Super Mario Galaxy (something you don’t see too much on usual game forums and sites). There was a comment saying that this trend of telling the player what to do started with Super Mario World. And that is true. I do remember not liking those little text boxes. The only text box that mattered was the first time Mario saw Yoshi: it was Yoshi introducing himself. But even that could have been taken out.

I really liked these lines:

Then there are games like Super Mario Bros. 3, where some of the things you can do with your limited move-set of running and jumping are so perfectly nuanced that they are unnecessary in the natural course of the game — like jumping on infinitely-spawning enemies and hovering using the button-mashing hover ability so that you can keep stomping them to infinity, earning extra lives. These kinds of things are wholly optional, and make you feel great to figure out. Games seldom do these sorts of things anymore — we have executive producers wanting to turn anything and everything into a “feature”. If the Super Mario Galaxy team made Super Mario Bros. 3, there’d probably be a little rabbit sitting by the goomba pipe in 1-2 telling us “I wonder what happens if you use a RACCOON TAIL to HOVER and stomp a bunch of goombas in a row? . . . I bet you can get A LOT OF EXTRA LIVES.”

I’ve noticed that Mario, as well as Zelda, games have lost their arcade roots and become more puzzle orientated. In the 2d Mario games, you just kept moving to the right. It didn’t matter how you did it. There were many ways to go to the right. Starting in Super Mario World, the goals became more and more puzzle orientated with collect-a-thons. 3d Marios so repel me not so much that they are 3d but because 3d Mario is a collectathon. It isn’t about moving to a flagpole. It is about finding a star and this always results in some stupid ‘puzzle’. If they made a direct 3d game of Super Mario Brothers (1,2,3 or 4) that actually played like the 2d games but was in 3d, I’d be interested in it. However, they couldn’t be re-using the same levels five six or seven times. I’d want new levels each time.

When I first played Galaxy, I was very excited because it felt like I could explore anywhere. But, sadly, I realized I couldn’t, and I was stuck on a very linear path that led to the star. The next stage was in the same stage but another linear path that led to another star. Sometimes you can break this linear path but it only leads to another star. I hate collecting stars.

I loved Zelda in how I got my sword and could start to go anywhere. Granted, you can’t go anywhere because you may need some items and are too weak. But it FELT like you could. Metroid gave that same feeling. This is why I don’t like the definition of the “Metroid Genre” as exploration where you need better items to access new areas. Metroid was a very trippy experience where it felt like there was a massive world inside that little cartridge. It did not feel like an obstacle course.

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